Criminal Queers or Ladies in Waiting? Exploring Black and Latinx Trans Political History, 1950s and 1960s

In January 1965, a seventeen-year-old on trial for burglary was issued a court order for “surgical sex repair.” Doctors believed the youth was afflicted by “transsexualism” and that surgery would help break the individual’s cycle of juvenile delinquency, arrest, and incarceration. The teenager was effectively sentenced to transsexual surgery, which the Baltimore judge believed would provide the same rehabilitative end as incarceration. The youth, known as G.L., was institutionalized at John Hopkins to await surgery but ran away and never returned. We do not know much about G.L. – neither their race nor gender – but their case nonetheless gives us insight into trans individuals’ encounters with legal and medical institutions in the postwar period. All trans people, whether self-identified as such or not, confronted regimes of control through medical gatekeepers or police officers who enforced gender and sexual norms. However, as Jules Gill-Peterson has shown, Black trans and trans of color people were more likely to be incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, juvenile detention centers, jails, or prisons, rather than slated for treatment. My paper explores trans history in the postwar US, discussing first how the emergence of transsexual medicine split and reshaped trans communities along the lines of race and class. Then, I highlight archives of “street transvestites” to discuss the social and economic aspects of Black and Latinx trans lives. My paper invites scholars of the carceral state to examine how the historical evolution of American law enforcement and incarceration strategies intersected with Black trans and trans of color history. Specifically, what led Black trans youth and “street transvestites” to become suspicious threats to state authorities at mid-century? How did the state conspire with medical institutions and local law enforcement to handle them?